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The problem I was having when running SWTBot tests in Travis CI was that I could not use the new container-based infrastructure of Travis, which allows to cache things like the local maven repository. This was not possible since to run SWTBot tests you need a Window Manager (in Linux, you can use metacity), and so you had to install it during the Travis build; this requires sudo and using sudo prevents the use of the container-based infrastructure. Not using the cache means that each build would download all the maven artifacts from the start.

Now you can use the container-based infrastructure and install metacity together (note that you won’t be able to cache installed apt packages, so each time the build runs, metacity will have to be reinstalled, but installing metacity is much faster than downloading all the Maven/Tycho artifacts).

The steps to run SWTBot tests in Travis can be summarized as follows:

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sudo: false

language: java

jdk: oraclejdk7

cache:

directories:

-$HOME/.m2

env: DISPLAY=:99.0

install: true

addons:

apt:

packages:

-metacity

#before_install:

# - sudo apt-get update

# - sudo apt-get install metacity

before_script:

-sh-e/etc/init.d/xvfbstart

-metacity--sm-disable--replace2>metacity.err&

I left the old steps “before_install” commented out, just as a comparison.

“sudo: false” enables the container based infrastructure

“cache:” ensures that the Maven repository is cached

“env:” enables the use of graphical display

“addons:apt:packages” uses the extensions that allow you to install whitelisted APT packages (metacity in our case).

“before_script:” starts the virtual framebuffer and then metacity.

Then, you can specify the Maven command to run your build (here are some examples:

I’ve just started using the brand new Eclipse installer, and I’d like to report my experiences here. First of all, a big praise to Ed Merks and Eike Stepper for creating Oomph, on which the installer is based.

First of all, the installer is currently available in the “Developer Builds” section:

Once you downloaded it and extracted it, just run the executable oomph:

If you see an exclamation mark (on the top right corner), click on it, you’ll see some updates are available, so update it right away, and when it’s done, press OK to restart it.

The very same top right corner, also opens a menu for customization of some features, the one I prefer is the Bundle Pool, a cool feature that has been in Eclipse for so many years, and so very badly advertised, I’m afraid!

“p2 natively supports the notion of bundle pooling. When using bundle pooling, multiple applications share a common plugins directory where their software is stored. There is no duplication of content, and no duplicated downloads when upgrading software.”

One of the cool things of Oomph is that it natively and automatically supports bundle pools, it makes it really easy to manage them and makes installation faster and with less space requirements (what’s already been downloaded and installed won’t have to be downloaded and installed again for further Eclipse installations).

If you select that menu item, you can manage your bundle pools; the installer already detected existing bundle pools (I’ve been using them myself, manually, for some time now, and it detected that):

For this blog post I will create another bundle pool, just for testing. To create a new bundle pool, you first need to create a new p2 agent; the agent is responsible to manage the bundle pool, and to keep track of all the bundles that a specific Eclipse installation requires (this is also known as a p2 profile).

So I select “New Agent…” and choose a location in my hard disk; this will also set a bundle pool:

Just for demonstration, I’ll select the “pool”, “Delete…”, and create a “New Bundle Pool…” for the new agent, in another directory:

Then I select the new bundle pool, and press “OK”.

From now on, all the installations will be managed by the new agent, and all bundles will be stored in the new bundle pool.

OK, now, back to the main window, let’s start installing “Eclipse IDE for Java Developers”

In the next windows, I choose to install the new Eclipse in a different folder from the proposed default:

Let’s press “INSTALL”, and accept the LICENSE, the installation starts:

You’ll see that the installer is really quick (as far as I know, Oomph improved p2 internal mechanisms). It only took about a minute to install this Eclipse on my computer.

Then, you’re ready to launch this installation, or see the installation log.

But first, let’s have a look at the directory layout:

you see that the installed eclipse does not have the typical directory structure: it has no “features”/”plugins” directories: these are in the shared bundle pool. Also note that the p2 agent location has a directory representing the profile of the installed Eclipse.

Let’s try and install another Eclipse, e.g., the “Eclipse DSL Tools” (what else if not the one with the cool Xtext framework? 😉

The dialog proposes an installation directory based on my previous choice; I also select “Luna” as the platform:

Let’s press “INSTALL”… WOW! This time it’s even faster! You know why: only the new bundles are downloaded, everything else is shared. This also means: less space wasted on your hard disk!

But there are cooler things: Bundle pool management!

Go back to the “Bundle Pool Management” dialog, select the checkbox “Show Profiles” and you see the profiles handled by the current agent:

The source code assumes a specific remote directory on Sourceforge, that is part of one of my Sourceforge projects, and it is writable only with my username and password. If you want to test this example, you can simply modify the property remote.dir in the parent pom specifying a local path in your computer (or by passing a value to the maven command with the syntax -Dremote.dir=<localpath>). Indeed, rsync can also synchronize two local directories.

Recall that when you perform a synchronization, specifying the wrong local directory might lead to a complete deletion of that directory. Moreover, source and destinations URLs in rsync have a different semantics depending on whether they terminate with a slash or not, so make sure you understand them if you need to customize this ant file or to pass special URLs.

Creating and Deploying the p2 composite site

In this blog post we want to be able to add a new p2 site to the composite update site (and deploy it) for two different projects:

customeclipse.example.site: This is the update site with only our features and bundles

customeclipse.example.ide.site: This is the update site with our features and bundles and the Eclipse product definition.

To reuse the ant files for managing the p2 composite update site and syncing it with rsync, and the Maven executions that use such ant files, we put the ant files in the parent project customeclipse.example.tycho, and we configure the Maven executions in the pluginManagement section of the parent pom.

We also put in the parent pom all the properties we’ll use for the p2 composite site and for rsync (again, please have a look at the previous posts for their meaning)

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<!-- properties for deploying the composite update site and zipped products on Sourceforge -->

<!-- since this is used in the pluginManagement section, we need to make sure

the path always points to this pom's directory; project.basedir will always point

to the directory of the pom where the pluginManagement's plugins are used -->

Now, we can simply activate such plugins in the build sections of our site projects described above.

In particular, we activate such plugins only inside profiles; for example, in the customeclipse.example.site project we have:

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<profiles>

<profile>

<id>release-composite</id>

<activation>

<activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>

</activation>

<build>

<plugins>

<plugin>

<!-- this is configured in pluginManagement section of the parent pom -->

<groupId>org.eclipse.tycho.extras</groupId>

<artifactId>tycho-eclipserun-plugin</artifactId>

</plugin>

</plugins>

</build>

</profile>

<profile>

<id>deploy-composite</id>

<activation>

<activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>

</activation>

<build>

<plugins>

<plugin>

<!-- this is configured in pluginManagement section of the parent pom -->

<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>

</plugin>

</plugins>

</build>

</profile>

</profiles>

In customeclipse.example.ide.site we have similar sections, but the profiles are called differently, release-ide-composite and deploy-ide-composite, respectively.

So, if you want to update the p2 composite site with a new version containing only the features/bundles and deploy it on Sourceforge you need to run maven as follows

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mvn clean verify-Prelease-composite-Pdeploy-composite

If you want to do the same, including the custom product definitions you need to run maven as follows (the additional build-ide profile is required because the customeclipse.example.ide.site is included as a Maven module only when that profile is activated; this way, products are created only when that profile is activated – just because provisioning a product requires some time and we don’t want to do that on normal builds)

NOTE: The remote directory on Sourceforge hosting the composite update site will always be the same. This means that the local composite update site created and updated by both deploy-composite and deploy-ide-composite will be synchronized with the same remote folder.

In the customeclipse.example.ide.site, we added a p2.inf file with touchpoint instructions to add as update site in our Eclipse products the update site hosted on Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipseexamples/files/customeclipse/updates.

Deploying the zipped products

To copy the zipped products on Sourceforge we will still use rsync; actually, we won’t use any synchronization features: we only want to copy the zip files. I could have used the Ant Scp or Sftp tasks, but I experienced many problems with such tasks, so let’s use rsync also for that.

The ant file for rsync is slightly different with respect to the one shown in the previous post, since it has been refactored to pass the rsync macro more parameters. We still have the targets for update/commit synchronization; we added another target that will be used to simply copy something (i.e., the zipped products) to the remote directory, without any real synchronization. You may want to have a look at rsync documentation to fully understand the command line arguments.

<!-- just copy contents of the source directory without recursion and without removal -->

<target name="rsync-copy-dir-contents">

<rsync source="${rsync.local.dir}"dest="${rsync.remote.dir}"

delete=""filter="--filter='- /*/'"/>

</target>

<!-- = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

macrodef: rsync

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = -->

<macrodef name="rsync">

<attribute name="source" />

<attribute name="dest" />

<attribute name="recursive"default="-a" />

<attribute name="delete"default="--delete" />

<attribute name="filter"default="" />

<sequential>

<echo message="Rsync source:" />

<echo message="@{source}" />

<echo message="Rsync destination:" />

<echo message="@{dest}" />

<echo message="dryrun: ${dryrun}" />

<echo message="recursive: @{recursive}" />

<echo message="delete: @{delete}" />

<echo message="filter: @{filter}" />

<exec dir="."executable="rsync">

<arg line="@{recursive}" />

<arg line="@{delete}" />

<arg line="@{filter}" />

<arg value="-zvc" />

<!-- exclude all hidden files and directories -->

<arg line="--exclude='.*'" />

<!-- use ssh -->

<arg line="-e ssh" />

<arg line="${dryrun}" />

<!-- source for the rsync -->

<arg line="@{source}" />

<!-- destination for rsync -->

<arg value="@{dest}" />

</exec>

</sequential>

</macrodef>

</project>

In the customeclipse.example.ide.site, in the deploy-ide-composite profile, we configure another execution for the maven ant plugin (recall that in this profile the rsync synchronization configured in the parent’s pom pluginManagement section is also executed); this further execution will copy the zipped products to a remote folder on Sourceforge (as detailed in the previous post, you first need to create such folder using the Sourceforge web interface):

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<profile>

<id>deploy-ide-composite</id>

<activation>

<activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>

</activation>

<build>

<plugins>

<plugin>

<!-- this is configured in pluginManagement section of the parent pom -->

<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>

<!-- and we add the execution for copying zipped products -->

<executions>

<execution>

<id>deploy-ides</id>

<phase>verify</phase>

<configuration>

<target>

<ant antfile="${ant-files-path}/rsync.ant"

target="rsync-copy-dir-contents">

<property name="rsync.remote.dir"

value="${remote.dir}/products/"/>

<property name="rsync.local.dir"

value="${project.build.directory}/products/"/>

</ant>

</target>

</configuration>

<goals>

<goal>run</goal>

</goals>

</execution>

</executions>

</plugin>

</plugins>

</build>

</profile>

Note that when calling the rsync-copy-dir-contents of the rsync.ant file, we pass the properties as nested elements, in order to override their values (such properties’ value are already defined in the parent’s pom, and for this run we need to pass different values).

rsync will synchronize our local composite update site with the remote composite update site

a new p2 site will be created, and added to our local composite update site

rsync will synchronize our local changes with the remote composite update site

Eclipse products will be created and zipped

the zipped products will be copied to Sourceforge

A self-contained p2 repository

Recall from the previous post that since in customeclipse.example.ide.feature we added Eclipse features (such as the platform and jdt) as dependencies (and not as included features), then the p2 update site we’ll create will not contain such features: it will contain only our own features and bundles. And that was actually intentional.

However, this means that the users of our features and of our custom Eclipse will still need to add the standard Eclipse update site before installing our features or updating the installed custom Eclipse.

If you want your p2 repository to be self-contained, i.e., to include also the external dependencies, you can do so by setting includeAllDependencies to true in the configuration of the tycho-p2-repository-plugin.

It makes sense to do that in the customeclipse.example.ide.site, so that all the dependencies for our custom Eclipse product will end up in the p2 repository:

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<profiles>

<profile>

<id>release-ide-composite</id>

<activation>

<activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>

</activation>

<properties>

<!-- set it to true to have a self contained p2 repository https://wiki.eclipse.org/Tycho/eclipse-repository#Creating_a_self-contained_p2_repository -->

However, doing so every time we add a new p2 update site to the composite update site would make our composite update site grow really fast in size. A single p2 repository for this example, including all dependencies is about 110Mb. A composite update site with just two p2 repositories would be 220Mb, and so on.

I think a good rule of thumb is

include all dependencies the first time we release our product’s update site (setting the property includeAllDependencies to true, and then setting it to false right after the first release)

for further releases do not include dependencies

include the dependencies again when we change the target platform of our product (indeed, Tycho will take the dependencies from our target platform)

Provide a command line installer

Now that our p2 composite repository is on the Internet, our users can simply download the zip file according to their OS, unzip it and enjoy it. But we could also provide another way for installing our custom Eclipse: an ant file so that the user will have to

The ant file will use the p2 director command line application to install our Eclipse product directly from the remote update site (the ant file is self-contained since if the director application is not already installed, it will install it as the first task).

Here’s the install.ant file (note that we ask the director to install our custom Eclipse product, customeclipse.example.ide and, explicitly, the main feature customeclipse.example.feature; this reflects what we specified in the product configuration, in particular, the fact that customeclipse.example.feature must be a ROOT feature, so that it can be updatable – see all the details in the previous post)

Note that this will always install the latest version present in the remote composite update site.

For instance, consider that you created zipped products for version 1.0.0, then you deployed a small upgrade only for your features, version 1.0.1, i.e., without releasing new zipped products. The ant script will install the custom Eclipse including version 1.0.1 of your features.

Some experiments

After I deployed the self-contained p2 repository and the zipped products (activating the profiles release-ide-composite and deploy-ide-composite, with the property includeAllDependencies set to true, using the project customeclipse.example.ide.site), I deployed another p2 repository into the composite site only for the customeclipse.example.feature (activating the profiles release-composite and deploy-composite, i.e., using the project customeclipse.example.site).

Unzip the downloaded product, and check for updates (recall that the product is configured with the update site hosted on Sourceforge, through the p2.inf file described before). You will find that there’s an update for the Example Feature:

After the upgrade and restart you should see the new version of the feature installed:

You’ll have to wait a few minutes (and don’t worry about cookie warnings); run this version of the custom Eclipse, and you’ll find no available updates: check the installation details and you’ll see you already have the latest version of the Example Feature.

In this tutorial I’ll show how to build a custom Eclipse distribution with Maven/Tycho. We will create an Eclipse distribution including our own features/plugins and standard Eclipse features, trying to keep the size of the final distribution small.

First of all, we want to mimic the Eclipse SDK product and Eclipse SDK feature; have a look at your Eclipse Installation details

You see that “Eclipse SDK” is the product (org.eclipse.sdk.ide), and “Eclipse Project SDK” is the feature (org.eclipse.sdk.feature.group).

Moreover, we want to deal with a scenario such that

Our custom feature can be installed in an existing Eclipse installation, thus we can release it independently from our custom Eclipse distribution. Our custom Eclipse distribution must be updatable, e.g., when we release a new version of our custom feature.

The project representing our parent pom will be

customeclipse.example.tycho

The target platform is defined in

customeclipse.example.targetplatform

For this example we only need the org.eclipse.sdk feature and the native launcher feature

We created a plugin project and a feature project including such plugin (the plugin is nothing fancy, just an “Hello World Command” created with the Eclipse Plug-in project wizard):

customeclipse.example.plugin

customeclipse.example.feature

We also create another project for the p2 repository (Tycho packaging type: eclipse-repository) that distributes our plugin and feature (including the category.xml file)

customeclipse.example.site

All these projects are then configured with Maven/Tycho pom.xml files.

Then we create another feature that will represent our custom Eclipse distribution

customeclipse.example.ide.feature

This feature will then specify the features that will be part of our custom Eclipse distribution, i.e., our own feature (customeclipse.example.feature) and all the features taken from the Eclipse update sites that we want to include in our custom distribution.

Finally, we create another site project (Tycho packaging type: eclipse-repository) which is basically the same as customeclipse.example.site, but it also includes the product definition for our custom Eclipse product:

customeclipse.example.ide.site

NOTE: I’m using two different p2 repository projects because I want to be able to release my feature without releasing the product (see the scenario at the beginning of the post). This will also allow us to experiment with different ways of specifying the features for our custom Eclipse distribution.

Product Configuration

This is our product configuration file customeclipse.example.ide.product in the project customeclipse.example.ide.site and its representation in the Product Configuration Editor:

Note that we use org.eclipse.sdk.ide and org.eclipse.ui.ide.workbench for launching product extension identifier and application (we don’t have a custom application ourselves).

ATTENTION: Please pay attention to “uid” and “id” in the .product file, which correspond to “ID” and “Product” in the Product definition editor (quite confusing, isn’t it? 😉

This product configuration includes our customeclipse.example.ide.feature; we also inserted in the end the standard start level configuration, and other properties, like the standard workspace location.

The pom in this project will also activate the product materialization and archiving (we also specify the file name of the zip with our own pattern):

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<plugin>

<groupId>org.eclipse.tycho</groupId>

<artifactId>tycho-p2-director-plugin</artifactId>

<version>${tycho-version}</version>

<executions>

<execution>

<id>materialize-products</id>

<goals>

<goal>materialize-products</goal>

</goals>

</execution>

<execution>

<id>archive-products</id>

<goals>

<goal>archive-products</goal>

</goals>

</execution>

</executions>

<configuration>

<products>

<product>

<!-- The uid in the .product file, NOT the name of the .product file -->

We chose NOT to include org.eclipse.example.ide.site as a module in our parent pom.xml: we include it only when we enable the profile build-ide: installing and provisioning a product takes some time, so you may not want to do that on every build invocation. In that profile we add the customeclipse.example.ide.site module, this is the relevant part in our parent pom

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<profile>

<id>build-ide</id>

<activation>

<activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>

</activation>

<properties>

<target-file-name>luna</target-file-name>

</properties>

<modules>

<module>../customeclipse.example.ide.site</module>

</modules>

<build>

<plugins>

<!-- specify all environments when building the IDE -->

<plugin>

<groupId>org.eclipse.tycho</groupId>

<artifactId>target-platform-configuration</artifactId>

<version>${tycho-version}</version>

<configuration>

<target>

<artifact>

<groupId>customeclipse.example</groupId>

<artifactId>customeclipse.example.targetplatform</artifactId>

<version>${project.version}</version>

<classifier>${target-file-name}</classifier>

</artifact>

</target>

<environments>

<environment>

<os>win32</os>

<ws>win32</ws>

<arch>x86_64</arch>

</environment>

<environment>

<os>macosx</os>

<ws>cocoa</ws>

<arch>x86_64</arch>

</environment>

<environment>

<os>linux</os>

<ws>gtk</ws>

<arch>x86_64</arch>

</environment>

</environments>

</configuration>

</plugin>

</plugins>

</build>

</profile>

In this profile, we also specify the environments for which we’ll build our custom Eclipse distribution. When this profile is not active, the target-platform-configuration will use only the current environment.

In the rest of the tutorial we’ll examine different ways of defining customeclipse.example.ide.feature. In my opinion, only the last one is the right one; but that depends on what you want to achieve. However, we’ll see the result and drawbacks of all the solutions.

That’s because it tries to include in customeclipse.example.ide.feature.source the source feature of org.eclipse.sdk, which does not exist (org.eclipse.sdk already includes sources of its included features). You need to tell the tycho plugin to skip the source of org.eclipse.sdk:

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<plugin>

<groupId>org.eclipse.tycho.extras</groupId>

<artifactId>tycho-source-feature-plugin</artifactId>

<version>${tycho-extras-version}</version>

<executions>

<execution>

<id>source-feature</id>

<phase>package</phase>

<goals>

<goal>source-feature</goal>

</goals>

<configuration>

<excludes>

<!-- These are bundles and feature that do not have a corresponding

source version; NOT the ones that we do not want source versions -->

<feature id="org.eclipse.sdk" />

</excludes>

</configuration>

</execution>

</executions>

</plugin>

The build should succeed.

Let’s copy the installed product directory (choose the one for your OS platform) to another folder; we perform the copy because a subsequent build will wipe out the target directory and we want to do some experiments. Let’s run the product and we see that our custom IDE shows our custom feature menu “Sample Menu” and the corresponding tool bar button:

If we check the installation details we see the layout mimicking the ones of Eclipse SDK (which is included in our product)

Now let’s run the build again with above maven command.

If you have a look at the target directory you see that besides the products, in custom.eclipse.ide.site/target you also have a p2 repository,

we will use the p2 repository to try and update the custom ide that we created in the first maven build (the one we copied to a different directory and that we ran in the previous step). So let’s add this built repository (in my case is /home/bettini/work/eclipse/tycho/custom-eclipse/customeclipse.example.ide.site/target/repository/) in the custom ide’s “Install New Software” dialog.

You see our Example Feature, and if you uncheck Group items by category you also see the Custom Eclipse Project SDK feature (corresponding to customeclipse.example.ide.feature) and Custom Eclipse SDK (corresponding to our product definition uid customeclipse.example.ide).

But wait… only the product is updatable! Why? (You see that’s the only one with the icon for updatable elements; if you try “Check for updates” that’s the only one that’s updatable)

Why can’t I update my “Example Feature” by itself?

If you try to select “Example Feature” in the “Install” dialog to force the update, and press Next…

you’ll get an error, and the proposed solution, i.e., also update the product itself:

And if you have a look at the original error…

…you get an idea of the problem beneath: since we INCLUDED our “customeclipse.example.feature” in our product’s feature “customeclipse.example.ide.feature” the installed product will have a strict version requirement on “customeclipse.example.feature”: it will want exactly the version the original product was built with; long story short: you can’t update that feature, you can only update the whole product.

Before going on, also note in the target directory you have a zip of the p2 repository that has been created: customeclipse.example.ide.site-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip it’s about 200 MB! That’s because the created p2 repository contains ALL the features and bundles INCLUDED in your product (which in our case, it basically means, all features INCLUDED in “customeclipse.example.ide.feature”).

Require org.eclipse.sdk

Let’s try and modify “customeclipse.example.ide.feature” so that it does NOT include the features, but DEPENDS on them (we can also set a version range for required features).

First of all, note that the p2 repository zip in the target folder of customeclipse.example.ide.site is quite small! Indeed, the repository contains ONLY our features, not all the requirements (in case, you can also force Tycho to include all the requirements), since, as stated above, the required feature will not be part of the repository.

Now let’s do the experiment once again:

copy the built product for your OS into another directory

run the product custom ide

run another maven build

add the new created p2 repository in the custom ide “Install new software” dialog

Well… the Example Feature does not appear as updatable, but this time, if we select it and press Next, we are simply notified that it is already installed, and that it will be updated

So we can manually update it, but not automatically (“Check for updates” will still propose to update the whole product).

At the time of writing the Eclipse product definition editor does not support this feature, so we must edit the .product definition manually and add the line for specifying that customeclipse.example.feature must be a root level feature:

Let’s do the experiment again; but before trying to update let’s see that the installed software layout is now different: our Example Feature is now a root level feature (it’s also part of our Custom SDK IDE since it’s still required by customeclipse.example.ide.feature but that does not harm, and you may also want to remove that as a requirement in customeclipse.example.ide.feature).

Hey! This time our “Example Feature” is marked as updatable

and also Check for updates proposes “Example Feature” as updatable independently from our product!

What happens if we make also customeclipse.example.ide.feature” a root feature? You may want to try that, and the layout of the installed software will list 3 root elements: our product “Custom Eclipse SDK”, our ide.feature “Custom Eclipse Project SDK” (which is meant to require all the software from other providers, like in this example, the org.eclipse.sdk feature itself) and our “Example Feature”.

This means that also “Custom Eclipse Project SDK” can be updated independently; this might be useful if we plan to release a new version of the ide.feature including (well, depending on) other software not included in Eclipse SDK itself (e.g., Mylyn, Xtext, or something else). At the moment, I wouldn’t see this as a priority so I haven’t set customeclipse.example.ide.feature as a root level feature in the product configuration.

Minimal Distribution

The problem of basing our distribution on org.eclipse.sdk is that the final product will include many features and bundles that you might not want in your custom distribution; e.g., CVS features, not to mention all the sources of the platform and PDE and lots of documentation. Of course, if that’s what we want, then OK. But if we want only the Java Development Tools in our custom distribution (besides our features of course)?

We can tweak the requirements in customeclipse.example.ide.feature and keep them minimal (note that the platform feature is really needed):

you have full and complete access to the files upload system either with a shell or, most importantly for the technique I’ll describe here, with rsync. From what I understand, instead, bintray will manage the binary artifacts for you;

in order to create and update a p2 composite site you must have access to the current file system layout of the p2 update site, which I seem to understand is not possible with bintray;

you have download statistics and your artifacts will automatically mirrored in sourceforge’s mirrors.

By the way: you can store your git repository anywhere you want, and publish the binaries on sourceforge. (see this page and this other page).

The steps of the technique I’ll describe here can be summarized as follows: when it comes to release a new child in the p2 composite update site (possibly already published on Sourceforge), the following steps are performed during the Maven/Tycho build

Use rsync to get an update local version of the published p2 composite repository somewhere in your file system (this includes the case when you never released a version, so you’ll get a local empty directory)

Build the p2 repository with Tycho

Add the above created p2 repository as a new child in the local p2 composite repository (this includes the case where you create a new composite repository, since that’s your first release)

Use rsync to commit the changes back to the remote p2 composite repository

Since we use rsync, we have many opportunities:

we’re allowed to manually modify (i.e., from outside the build infrastructure) the p2 composite repository, for instance by removing a child repository containing a wrong release, and commit the changes back;

we can release from any machine, notably from Jenkins or Hudson, since we always make sure to have a synchronized local version of the released p2 composite repository.

Prepare the directory on Sourceforge

This assumes that you have an account on Sourceforge, that you have registered a project. You need to create the directory that will host your p2 composite repository in the “Files” section.

Ant script for rsync

I’m using an ant script since it’s easy to call that from Maven, and also manually from the command line. This assumes that you have already rsync installed on your machine (or in the CI server from where you plan to perform releases).

We have a macro for invoking rsync with the desired options (have a look at rsync documentation for understanding their meaning, but it should be straightforward to get an idea).

In particular, the transfer will be done with ssh, so you must have an ssh key pair, and you must have put the public key on your account on sourceforge. Either you created the key pair without a passphrase (e.g., for releasing from a CI server of your own), or you must make sure you have already unlocked the key pair on your local machine (e.g., with an ssh-agent, or with a keyring, depending on your OS).

The arguments source and dest will depend on whether we’re doing an update or a commit (see the two ant targets). If you define the property dryrun as -n then you can simulate the synchronization (both for update and commit); this is important at the beginning to make sure that you synchronize what you really mean to synchronize. Recall that when you perform an update, specifying the wrong local directory might lead to a complete deletion of that directory (the same holds for commit and the remote directory).Moreover, source and destinations URLs in rsync have a different semantics depending on whether they terminate with a slash or not, so make sure you understand them if you need to customize this ant file or to pass special URLs.

The properties rsync.remote.dir and rsync.local.dir will be passed from the Tycho build (or from the command line if you call the ant script directly). Once again, please use the dryrun property until you’re sure that you’re synchronizing the right paths (both local and remote).

Releasing during the Tycho build

Now we just need to call this ant’s targets appropriately from the Tycho build; I’ll do that in the pom.xml of the project that builds and updates the composite p2 repository.

Since I don’t want to push a new release on the remote site on each build, I’ll configure the plugins inside a profile (it’s up to you to decide when to release): here’s the new part:

The local URL specifies where the local p2 composite site is stored (see the previous post), in this example it defaults to

${user.home}/p2.repositories/updates/

Again, the final / is crucial.

We configured the maven-antrun-plugin with two executions:

before updating the p2 composite update site (phase prepare-package) we make sure we have a synchronized local version of the repository

after updating the p2 composite update site (phase verify) we commit the changes to the remote repository

That’s all

Let’s try it

Of course, if you want to try it, you need a project on sourceforge and a directory on that project’s Files section (and you’ll have to change the URLs accordingly in the pom file).

To perform a release we need to call the build enabling the profile release-composite, and specify at least verify as goal:

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mvn clean verify-Prelease-composite

Let’s say we still haven’t released anything.

Since the remote directory is empty, in our local file system we’ll simply have the directory created. In the end of the build, the composite site is created and the remote directory will be synchronized with our local contents:

[/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre/bin/java,-jar,/media/app/.m2/repository/p2/osgi/bundle/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher/1.3.0.v20140415-2008/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher-1.3.0.v20140415-2008.jar,-install,/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target/eclipserun-work,-configuration,/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target/eclipserun-work/configuration,-application,org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner,-buildfile,packaging-p2composite.ant,p2.composite.add,-Dsite.label=Composite Site Example,-Dproject.build.directory=/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target,-DunqualifiedVersion=1.0.0,-DbuildQualifier=v20150121-1828]

[/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre/bin/java,-jar,/media/app/.m2/repository/p2/osgi/bundle/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher/1.3.0.v20140415-2008/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher-1.3.0.v20140415-2008.jar,-install,/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target/eclipserun-work,-configuration,/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target/eclipserun-work/configuration,-application,org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner,-buildfile,packaging-p2composite.ant,p2.composite.add,-Dsite.label=Composite Site Example,-Dproject.build.directory=/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target,-DunqualifiedVersion=1.0.0,-DbuildQualifier=v20150121-1832]

Let’s remove our local copy and try to perform another release, this time the update phase will make sure our local composite repository is synchronized with the remote site (we’ll get the whole composite site we had already released), so that when we add another composite child we’ll update our local composite repository; then we’ll commit the changes to the server (again, by uploading only the modified files, i.e., the compositeArtifacts.xml and compositeContent.xml and the new directory with the new child repository:

[/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/jre/bin/java,-jar,/media/app/.m2/repository/p2/osgi/bundle/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher/1.3.0.v20140415-2008/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher-1.3.0.v20140415-2008.jar,-install,/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target/eclipserun-work,-configuration,/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target/eclipserun-work/configuration,-application,org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner,-buildfile,packaging-p2composite.ant,p2.composite.add,-Dsite.label=Composite Site Example,-Dproject.build.directory=/home/bettini/work/eclipse/p2composite/p2composite-example/p2composite.example.site/target,-DunqualifiedVersion=1.0.0,-DbuildQualifier=v20150121-1837]

With mirrors: http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipseexamples/files/p2composite.example/updates/

Main site: http://master.dl.sourceforge.net/project/eclipseexamples/p2composite.example/updates/

You may want to try them both in Eclipse.

Please keep in mind that you may hit some unavailability errors now and then, if sourceforge sites are down for maintenance or unreachable for any reason… but that’s not much different when you hit a bad Eclipse mirror, or the main Eclipse download site is down… I guess no hosting site is perfect anyway 😉

The goal of composite repositories is to make this task easier by allowing you to have a parent repository which refers to multiple children. Users are then able to reference the parent repository and the children’s content will transparently be available to them.

The nice thing of composite repositories is that they can be nested at any level. Thus, I like to have nested composite repositories according to the major.minor, major.minor.service.qualifier.

Thus the layout of the p2 composite repository should be similar to the following screenshot

Note that the name of the directories that contain a standard p2 repository have the same name of the contained feature.

The key points of a p2 composite repository are the two files compositeArtifacts.xml and compositeContent.xml. Their structure is simple, e.g.,

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<?xml version='1.0'encoding='UTF-8'?>

<?compositeMetadataRepository version='1.0.0'?>

<repository name='Composite Site Example All Versions'type='org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.metadata.repository.CompositeMetadataRepository'version='1.0.0'>

<properties size='2'>

<property name='p2.timestamp'value='1421600341270'/>

<property name='p2.atomic.composite.loading'value='true'/>

</properties>

<children size='3'>

<child location='1.0'/>

<child location='1.1'/>

<child location='2.0'/>

</children>

</repository>

Note that a child location is intended relative to the path of these files; you can also specify absolute paths, not to mention http urls to other remote p2 sites.

The structure is not that complex, so you can also create it by hand; but keeping it up to date might not be that trivial. With that respect, p2 provides some ant tasks for managing composite repositories (creating, adding an entry, removing an entry), and that’s my favorite way to deal with composite repositories. I’ll detail what I usually do in this blog post, in particular, how to create (or update) a p2 composite repository with a new entry during the build.

The ant file is completely reusable and customizable by passing properties; you can reuse it as it is, after you setup your pom.xml as detailed below.

In this blog post I’ll show how to do that with Maven/Tycho, but the same procedure can be done in a Buckminster build (as I’ll hint at the end).

I’ll use a simple example, https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/p2composite-example, consisting of a plug-in project, a feature project, a project for the site, and a releng project (a Maven/Tycho parent project). The plug-in and feature project are not interesting in this context: the most interesting one is the site project (a Tycho eclipse-repository packaging type).

Of course, in order to run such ant tasks, you must run them using the org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner application. Buckminster, as an Eclipse product, already contains that application. With Tycho, you can use the tycho-eclipserun-plugin, to run an Eclipse application from Maven.

We use this technique for releasing a new version of our EMF-Parsley Eclipse project. We do that directly from our Hudson HIPP instance; the idea is that the location of the final main composite site is the one that will be served through HTTP from the download.eclipse.org. We have a dedicated Hudson job that will release a new version and put it in the composite repository.

The ant file

The internal details of this ant files are not necessary to reuse it, so you can skip the first part of this section (you only need to know the main properties to pass). Of course, if you read it and you have suggestions for improve it, I’d be very grateful

Note that we’ll also create a p2.index file. I prefer not to compress the compositeArtifacts.xml and compositeContent.xml files for easier inspection or manual modification, but you can compress them setting the “compressed” to “true” property above.

First of all, this task will copy the p2 repository created during the build in the correct place inside the nested p2 composite repository.

Then, it will create or update the composite site for the nested repository major.minor, and then it will create or update the composite site for the main site (the one storing all the versions). The good thing about these ant tasks is that if you add a child location that already exists they won’t complain (though you can set a property to make them fail in such situations); this is crucial for updating the main repository, since most of the time you will not release a new major.minor.

This target calls (i.e., depends on) another target to compute the properties to pass to the macrodef, according to the information passed from the pom.xml

Default properties (that can be modified by passing a value from the pom.xml file):

software.download.area: the absolute path of the parent folder for the composite p2 site (default is “p2.repositories” in your home directory)

updates.dir: the relative path of the composite p2 site (default is “updates”); this is relative to software.download.area

Thus, by default, the main p2 composite update site will end in ${user.home}/p2.repositories/updates. As hinted in the beginning, this can be any absolute local file system path; in EMF-Parsley Eclipse, since we release from Hudson, it will be the path served by the Eclipse we server download.eclipse.org. So we specify the two above properties accordingly.

These are the properties that must be passed from the pom.xml file

site.label: the main label that will appear in the composite site (and that will be recorded in the “Eclipse available sites”). The final label will be “${site.label} All Versions” for the main site and “${site.label} <major.minor>” for the nested composite sites.

project.build.directory: the location of the p2 repository created during the build (usually of the shape <project.id>/target/repository)

unqualifiedVersion: the version without qualifier (e.g., 1.1.0)

buildQualifier: the replaced qualifier in the built version

Note that except for the first property, the other ones have exactly the same name as the ones in Tycho (and are set by Tycho directly during the build, so we’ll reuse them).

Calling the ant task from pom.xml

Now, we only need to execute the above ant task from the pom.xml file of the eclipse-repository project,

ATTENTION: in the following snipped, for the sake of readability, I split the <appArgLine> into several lines, but in your pom.xml it must be exactly in one (long) line.

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<plugin>

<groupId>org.eclipse.tycho.extras</groupId>

<artifactId>tycho-eclipserun-plugin</artifactId>

<version>${tycho-version}</version>

<configuration>

<!-- IMPORTANT: DO NOT split the arg line -->

<appArgLine>

-application org.eclipse.ant.core.antRunner

-buildfile packaging-p2composite.ant p2.composite.add

-Dsite.label="Composite Site Example"

-Dproject.build.directory=${project.build.directory}

-DunqualifiedVersion=${unqualifiedVersion}

-DbuildQualifier=${buildQualifier}

</appArgLine>

<repositories>

<repository>

<id>luna</id>

<layout>p2</layout>

<url>http://download.eclipse.org/releases/luna</url>

</repository>

</repositories>

<dependencies>

<dependency>

<artifactId>org.eclipse.ant.core</artifactId>

<type>eclipse-plugin</type>

</dependency>

<dependency>

<artifactId>org.apache.ant</artifactId>

<type>eclipse-plugin</type>

</dependency>

<dependency>

<artifactId>org.eclipse.equinox.p2.repository.tools</artifactId>

<type>eclipse-plugin</type>

</dependency>

<dependency>

<artifactId>org.eclipse.equinox.p2.core.feature</artifactId>

<type>eclipse-feature</type>

</dependency>

<dependency>

<artifactId>org.eclipse.equinox.p2.extras.feature</artifactId>

<type>eclipse-feature</type>

</dependency>

<dependency>

<artifactId>org.eclipse.equinox.ds</artifactId>

<type>eclipse-plugin</type>

</dependency>

</dependencies>

</configuration>

<executions>

<execution>

<id>add-p2-composite-repository</id>

<phase>package</phase>

<goals>

<goal>eclipse-run</goal>

</goals>

</execution>

</executions>

</plugin>

As I said, you should pass site.label as you see fit (for the other properties you can use the default).

You may want to put this plugin specification inside a Maven profile, that you activate only when you are actually doing a release (see, e.g., what we do in this pom.xml, taken from our EMF-Parsley Eclipse project).

With Buckminster

As I hinted before, with Buckminster you can directly call the p2 ant tasks, since they are included in the Buckminster headless product. You will only need to add custom actions in the .cspec (or in the .cspex if you’re inside a plugin or feature project) that call the ant task passing the right properties. An example can be found here. This refers to a slightly different ant file from the one shown in this blog post, but the idea is still the same.

Possible Improvements

You may want to add another nesting level, e.g., major -> major.minor etc… This should be straightforward: you just need to call the macrodef another time, and compute the main update site directory differently.

Xtend compiles into Java source code, so it looks like it is trivial to analyze it with Sonarqube; of course, Sonarqube will analyze the generated Java code, but it’s rather easy to refer to the original Xtend code, since Xtend generates clean Java code

However, we Sonarqube 4.4 it looks like it’s harder than I thought due to some facts:

In the parent project we specify the actual project with sources to be analyzed, and the project containing tests (in this example I also use jacoco for code coverage, but that’s not crucial for this example):

The plugin and the plugin.tests projects intentionally contain Xtend and Java files with some Findbugs issues, e.g.,

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classXtendGreeting{

def greeting(){

"Hello, world."

}

def useEquals(){

// 2 findbugs issues:

// findbugs:DM_NUMBER_CTOR

// findbugs:EC_UNRELATED_TYPES

newInteger(0).equals("foo");

}

}

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packageexample

importorg.junit.Test

importorg.junit.Assert

classXtendGreetingTest{

@Testdef voidtestGreeting(){

val greeting=newXtendGreeting().greeting

println(greeting)

Assert.assertEquals("Hello, world.",greeting)

}

def useEquals2(){

// 2 findbugs issues:

// findbugs:DM_NUMBER_CTOR

// findbugs:EC_UNRELATED_TYPES

newInteger(0).equals("foo");

}

}

Now, assuming you have Sonarqube 4.4 running on your machine, you can run the typical maven commands to analyze your code (make sure you set the MaxPermSize in the MAVEN_OPTS otherwise the Xtend compiler will run out of memory):

and I created a Maven profile in the parent pom that, when activated, invokes the ant target, in the process-sources phase (recall that this phase is executed after generate-sources phase, when the Xtend files are compiled into Java code)

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<profiles>

<profile>

<id>process-xtend-code</id>

<activation>

<activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>

</activation>

<build>

<plugins>

<plugin>

<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>

<version>1.7</version>

<executions>

<execution>

<id>process-xtend-gen</id>

<phase>process-sources</phase>

<configuration>

<skip>!${process-xtend-gen}</skip>

<target>

<property name="project.basedir"value="${project.basedir}" />

<ant

antfile="${basedir}/../plugin.parent/process-xtend-gen.ant">

<target name="process-xtend-gen" />

</ant>

</target>

</configuration>

<goals>

<goal>run</goal>

</goals>

</execution>

</executions>

</plugin>

</plugins>

</build>

</profile>

</profiles>

Now, let’s invoke the two maven commands, but this time, the first one activates the above profile

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export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

mvn clean install-Pprocess-xtend-code

mvn sonar:sonar

OK, let’s go to the “Issues Drilldown” in the Sonarqube web interface and this time the issues are detected also in the plugin project:

You may want to select “Since previous analysis” in the combo box, to make sure that this analysis detected these new issues:

I recently started to play with Sonarqube to reduce “technical debt” and hopefully improve code quality. I’d like to report on my experiences about using Sonarqube to analyze Xsemantics, a DSL for writing rule systems (e.g., type systems) for Xtext languages.

I was already using the Jenkins Continuous Integration server, and while building I was already using Findbugs and Jacoco, thus, I was already analyzing such software, but Sonarqube brings new analysis rules for Java programs and it also integrates results from Findbugs and Jacoco, aggregating all the code quality results in a web site.

In spite of the Jenkins builds Sonarqube detected some issues when I started

First of all, I had to exclude the src-gen and emf-gen directories (the former is where Xtext generates all its artifacts, and the latter is where Xcore generates the EMF model files); since these are generated files and I did not want to make them part of the analysis. I’ve done such exclusion with a property in the main pom.xml (for readability I split it into lines):

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<sonar.exclusions>

file:**/src-gen/**,

file:**/emf-gen/**,

file:**/example/**,

file:**/tests/**,

**/*RuntimeModule.java,

**/*UiModule.java,

**/*XcoreReader.java,

**/*UiExamples.java,

**/*TypeSystemGen*.java,

**/*StandaloneSetup*.java

</sonar.exclusions>

Note that for the moment I’m also excluding tests from the analysis… it is considered best practice to analyse tests as well (and I have many of them), but I wanted to concentrate on the code first. I also excluded other Java files for which issues are reported, like the Xtext Guice modules, due to the wildcards in the method signatures… I have to live with them anyway

After that the number of issues reduced a little bit, but there were still some issues to fix; most of them were easy, basically due to Java conventions I hadn’t use (e.g., name of fields and methods or even names of type parameters).

Another thing that I had never considered was dependency cycles among Java packages and files. Sonarqube reports them. Luckily there were only few of them in Xsemantics, and the hardest part was to read the Dependency Structure Matrix, but in the end I managed to remove them (there must be nothing in the upper triangle to have no cycle):

Then came the last major issue: Duplicated Code!!! All by itself this issue was estimated with 13 days of technical debt! And most of the duplicated code was in the model inferrer (a concept from Xbase). Moreover, such inferrer is written in Xtend, a cleaner Java, and the Xtend compiler then generates Java code. Thus, Sonarqube analyses the generated Java code, and the detected duplicate code blocks are on the Java code. This means that it takes some time to understand the corresponding original Xtend code. That’s not impossible since Xtend generates clean Java code, but it surely adds some work

Before starting to remove duplicated code (around 80 blocks in the generated Java code) the Xtend inferrer was around 1090 lines long (many parts are related to string templates for code generation) corresponding to around 2500 lines of generated Java code! After the refactoring the Xtend inferrer was around 1045 lines long, and the generated Java code reduced to around 2000 lines.

That explains also the reduction of lines of code and complexity:

But now technical debt is 0

And it’s nice to look at this dashboard

By the way, I also had to disable some issues I did not agree on (tabulation characters) and avoid reported issues on method name conventions on a specific file (because methods that start with the underline characters _ have a specific meaning in Xtext/Xtend). Instead of disabling them on the Sonarqube web interface, I preferred to disable them using properties in the pom file so that it works across different Sonarqube installations (e.g., I also have a local Sonarqube instance on my machine to do some quick experiments). Such multi properties are not officially supported in the Sonar invocation (e.g., through the sonar runner or via Maven), but I found a workaround: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21825469/configure-sonar-sonar-issue-ignore-multicriteria-through-maven (but, be careful, it is considered a hack as reported in the mailing list: http://sonarqube.15.x6.nabble.com/sonar-issue-ignore-multicriteria-td5021722.html):

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<!-- see http://sonarqube.15.x6.nabble.com/sonar-issue-ignore-multicriteria-td5021722.html and

I recently had to install Linux Kubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander (at the time of writing I’ve already upgraded it to 14.04 Trusty Tahr) on a Dell Precision M3800 (a really cool and powerful laptop, see the details here).

The installation went really smooth, and I’m enjoying a very fast and stable Linux OS on this laptop.

In this blog post I’ll detail only a few tips and further tweaks after the installation.

Tweaks after installation

Here some tweaks after the installation.

Adjust Screen Resolution

This laptop comes with the “crazy” resolution of 3200×1800! Unfortunately, this is barely usable at least in my experience: everything is so small that I can’t read almost anything… adjusting the DPI as suggested here really did not help: the fonts, window border become readable and usable, but the system looks ugly… (by the way, the same problem holds in Windows 8, at least for my everyday program, i.e., Eclipse: most fonts and icons are not readable)… until these resolution problems are fixed in Kubuntu (and in some applications as Eclipse), I reverted the resolution to something smaller (and still the resolution is high :), that is 1920×1080.

Enable Hibernate

First check that hibernate actually works by running (remember that your swap partition is at least as large as your available RAM):

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sudo pm-hibernate

After you computer turns off, try and switch it back on. If your open applications re-open you can re-enable hibernate: run below command to edit the config file: